Breathing Books posts amazing book-related photos every day, many featuring old leather-bound hardbacks:

Image via Breathing Books

Image via Breathing Books

And the Guardian has recently started a Flickr group for bookshelf photos, asking readers for the stories behind their books and cataloguing systems as well. One commenter, who has a small owl statue peering out from between her books, notes, “Not really a bookend, more an owl sandwich. I’ve got quite a collection of childrens books featuring owls – I think it was the first bird type my nephews recognised!” Another has so many books that only a wide-angle lens could capture them in one frame:

Try to control your drool.

photo by austinevan

When I moved from Ann Arbor to Boston, movers came to pack our things. After the thirteenth box of books–literally–Mover #1 actually set down his tape gun and said in complete seriousness, “Do you really need all these books?”

Oh yes. I needed them.

The New York Times, however, understands that now and then one must actually cull one’s library for reasons of space. The editors asked several authors for their advice on how to do it:

Francine Prose:

• Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the Pharaohs.
• If a country, like Czechoslovakia, no longer exists, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to take the travel guide along with you when you go.

Chang-rae Lee:

• Any novel or poetry collection written by a celebrity
• Books originating from or inspired by a blog, because I’m hopelessly sentimental about the dying world of book-only books.
• Anthologies of fiction and poetry that have “greatest” in the title; “best” is O.K., but “greatest” usually means a hit list of the too familiar and bland.

Fred Bass, co-owner of The Strand:

My advice is to first clean out duplicates and books with repetitive information — why do you need six dictionaries? Next, remove all books with out-of-date information, like atlases and reference books. Political, economic and topical books should be the next category to sort through; you don’t really need that copy of Richard Simmons’ “Never-Say-Diet Book” (a 1981 best-seller), or a book on the future of the Democratic or Republican parties, written 20 years ago.

And a man after my own heart:

Joshua Ferris:

Get rid of books? Are you kidding? The only reason anyone should get rid of a book is if they’re going for that Japanese minimalist design look in which the room is all white and not even the drawers are visible. For those of us with more modest decor goals, living everyday lives with clutter and old clothes, cats and children, sour towels hanging from the rack, knickknacks, pilled throws, boring old mementos, what could be more essential than books?

FWR readers, as you enter this new year, will you be clearing out any space on your shelves for new books? If so, tell us what you’ll be getting rid –and why.

(And, in case this discussion of getting rid of books gave you the vapors, here’s the antidote: those same writers on books they could never, ever part with.)

the former library of Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness, photo by Qtea (flickr cc)

The Elegant Variation has a lovely little post about the joy of setting up one’s library again after a move:

So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely be described as half-assed, though I could always find anything.) Finally, the actual placement on the shelves, which is always delayed by the very pleasant act of browsing through beloved titles.

Meanwhile, Roger Ebert meditates on his (over)abundance of books in his essay “Books Do Furnish A Life”:

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best-seller by James Could Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. It and the other books on the list have been rendered obsolete, so that his essay is cruelly dated. But I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was 14, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.

And then there’s this.